I know this is wildly offtopic, but Saturn is just simply soo cool! If you want to get ANYBODY hooked onto astronomy, just show them a picture of Saturn. I shudder to think of the day we will strip-mine Saturn (or equivalent heinousness), and will defile the planet with our greed. At least, we can hope.
The linkage in the article is incorrect. The linked article talks about a startup (Elementeo) founded by a 13 year old kid named Anshul Samar, and NOT about PlaySpan, supposedly founded by 12 year old named Arjun Mehta.
Naked "pointers" for data structures are kind of an archaic concept that are happily being phased out
Huh? Every reference to a dynamically-created object (so, everything apart from primitive types like int or char) in Java is a pointer. There's a reason why the GP specifically said naked pointers. Unlike C, Java and C# does NOT allow you to create a pointer that points to a user-specified memory location (which is what the GP referred to as a naked pointer). This is because memory management is done by the VM, and not left to the user, and IMHO, this is a GOOD thing. Do not mess with the affairs of raw pointers, for they are quick to anger and you taste particularly well with peanut sauce.
The die area of a given chip roughly halves with each technology node. This is not entirely true. Although I agree overall with what you're saying, core logic transistors scale much worse than cache as the manufacturing process decreases in size. I'm not sure if AMD factors this process disadvantage into their chip design, but it is an interesting design choice that they choose to stuff their chip real estate with logic transistors instead of cache. I'm sure that I'm oversimplifying, but I have a gut feeling that they possibly might be choosing to use less cache and more logic precisely because they know they will always be a process node behind Intel, and at least this way, their process disadvantage is somewhat compensated.
Interestingly enough, Intel has traditionally adopted the exact opposite chip design strategy. IMHO, Intel's design ethos is first driven by manufacturing, and only secondly by pure design. Of course, they have every right to do so as they've consistently led the industry in process and manufacturing technology. However, this sometimes teeters into arrogance, and they have tended to fix a shoddy design by throwing cache at it, and/or relying on a die shrink (which also fabulously shrinks cache!).
This process/cache luxury, compounded by bureaucracy can tend to make Intel come up with conservative designs. I'm not even going to talk about P4 or Prescott as it has been beaten to death and beyond. However, Justin Rattner recently hinted the same thing as well when he encouraged his research teams to come up with bolder and even impractical designs, and not start thinking about commercial viability so early on in the research/design stage. AMD, OTOH, simply cannot afford this luxure as they're usually getting whipped by Intel manufacturing AND by Intel marketing muscle, and are usually in a "do or die" mode. This usually makes them come up with riskier or bolder design.
Having said that, Core2 is a superb architecture, and in my opinion, will be neck-to-neck with even Barcelona (win some benchmarks, lose some benchmarks). Its only in the server space that AMD will have two distinct advantages: Hypertransport for scalability, and DDR2 instead of FBD for power consumption. Sigh... if only Intel had not scrapped Whitefield. I guess it would have released by now.. and that too with a native quadcore design and CSI. Look at the Tigerton hack-job for a contrast... pathetic (but of course, easier to manufacture).
Yes, MP3 is a lossy format, but so long as you don't open it up and edit it all the time, it will keep 99.99% of the sound quality it had when it was recorded. But then, it is the 0.01% that has kept the entire audiophile industry going, hasn't it? I was buying the audiophile story when it was about vacuum tubes vs transistors, good vs bad speakers, CD vs vinyl etc. However, I started zoning out when people started talking about power conditioners, gold connectors, silver cabling, and crap that costs thousands of dollars and looks "oh so very retro".
Back to your point, my ears can't really make out the difference between a CD and an MP3 as long as the MP3 is encoded at a decent bitrate. I can clearly make out the difference between a 128kbps and 256kbps, but not between 256kbps and 320kbps or VBR.
Obviously, that's not an exclusive or you're using there. One could argue that it's redundant. After all if B implies A, then asserting A is the same as asserting A or B. (Do not mod his post redundant, however. That's not what I mean. I'm just making a joke.) Dude, let it go. GP was just trying to be a karma OR.
I agree, and my personal experience with corporate passwords has been the same. I'm sure this would disturb security geeks at various levels (or get them salivating!), but I don't see this as a *huge* loophole since most of the systems are inside the corporate firewall anyway. IMHO, this is about as big a security threat as an employee or a contractor copying sensitive data (which the password is protecting) and trying to profit from it illegally.
A system that I was managing once started crashing, and further investigation revealed that the password of an upstream system had been changed. When we contacted the admin team of the offending application, they informed us that they had upgraded the password from 123 to the "highly secure" (in their words) 234.
Since I was tired, I just shut it down and figured I would look into it later. This saves me some research! Aah my friend, in your weariness, you stumbled upon the magic solution for all Microsoftie ailments...
REBOOT! (and rejoice, and talk to me about uptime later)
Not exclusively nicotine. They sell an image. Nicotine is just a nice side effect that keeps people physically addicted to their stuff. Sure, but so does alcohol or any other legally addictive substance. My point here is not to start a comparison war or a flame on which drug is healthier/less addictive etc. I'm just trying to point out that there is a LOT of hypocrisy surrounding cigarettes and smoking. My guess is that this hypocrisy mainly arises because smoking has now become socially unfashionable and even a taboo, at least in the US. Let me put it another way: If the same study was done about say, the beneficial effect of wines or alcohol in general, i bet you would see a tiny fraction of comments making snide remarks about the validity of the test and about the funding agency. Yes yes, I know, the tobacco industry is evil and has a history of funding shady science, but I still feel that the scorn being shown on/. is disproportionate. Heck, even a hard drug like cocaine or LSD wouldn't get this much opposition and sarcasm.
Yes, and I'm happy to see that at least we're making *some* progress. I'm also saddened to see that apart from HIV, there is hardly any research going on to find cures for infectious diseases (TB, Malaria, viral diseases), at least when compared to the obscene amount of money being thrown into chronic or "lifestyle" diseases like diabetes and hypertension. This is all the more disturbing considering that infectious diseases afflict and kill so many more people than chronic diseases. It just so happens that most of the people afflicted happen to be from developing or poor countries, and hence, are not the target market segment for big pharma.
An interesting idea that I read somewhere proposed the setting up of Ansari-X style rewards or competitions for the company or team that first finds a cure/vaccine for these unfashionable diseases. This also becomes an easy way out for charity foundations like the Gates foundation, who're actually trying to do something meaningful in this field. Instead of giving grants to researchers much like a venture capitalist, perhaps instituting sizable multi-million dollar rewards is a better incentive for researchers. Plus, there is no need to monitor the charity money to make sure that it is being utilized properly. But then again, this might simply be an oversimplified solution to the problem.
No, most people don't overclock, even though it has become MUCH simpler nowadays to do simple overclocks (as it no longer requires hardware tweaks). Furthermore, overclocking does decrease the reliability and longevity of the CPU, as has been mentioned before in this thread. I still think there is some merit for hardware sites to focus on overclocking mainly because it gives you an indication of the headroom available in the CPU architecture (merom/conroe/woodcrest in this case), which indirectly gives you an indication of how good or robust the architecture is, and if it can still hold its own against the competition. This also gives you an indication if your investment in the said architecture will be worthwhile or not.
To answer your other questions, the "..50" set of Conroe CPUs have the same TDP (65W for the non-Extreme models) as their older versions, and you can expect a small improvement in system stability, mainly because of the new stepping and because Intel should have likely made several improvements in its 65nm manufacturing process over the last year. The new chipset also has a much better memory interface, though you will not notice the improvements in real life usage unless you are planning on a quad core. On the flip side, i believe that the new chipset consumes a bit more power than the earlier 965 chipset, but it's not an obscene increase.
If you already have a dual-core, you might want to wait a little until quad-cores get cheaper (Intel should be reducing quad-core prices by July-end, and you should be able to get it for $300). However, if you currently have a single core processor, and if you don't do any "extreme" computation, an upgrade to a dual core would definitely be a good idea. Even though individual softwares are not yet optimized to use multiple threads, you will notice that your computer is more "responsive", especially if you have several background softwares/processes running that periodically max out CPU usage on one of your cores.
Yes, I realize that my question was off-topic. My question was a more generic one, namely Linux v/s OpenBSD in terms of security. I was also interested in knowing how popular BSD and Linux are for these kind of requirements.
Sorry for the naive question in advance, but I was under the impression that some flavors of BSD (OpenBSD?) were extremely secure as well. Is that not so? In that case, wouldn't a BSD version be more suitable for secure/sensitive installations?
Again, please don't treat this as a flame. I'm just curious to know how BSD ranks vis a vis other OSes, especially Linux, and especially in terms of security.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but from the slightly different perspective. Things like the patent system (or DRM or privacy issues) have become so illogical that there's no way an average person can fight against the system by sane and normal means such as lawsuits, petitions, or elections. The most effective way to get rid of these stupid laws, IMHO, is by making sure that they self-destruct, i.e. become utterly ridiculous in the eyes of the media and the public. So, rejoice when people start filing patents for their navel lint or nasal hair structure. Chuckle gleefully when DRM softwares start taking people's system and create massive security holes. Cackle manically if some wiseguy sues McD for kaching-illion dollars because their "Happy Meal" didn't exactly make him happy. For remember, the candle burneth brightest before it dies out, to rehash a hoary saw. Or at least, we hope.
I see your point, but the customer DOES benefit sometimes. Take the current ongoing price war between AMD and Intel on desktop CPUs. Man, you wouldn't have dreamt of getting a good quadcore for under $300 a few months ago. My argument is that Intel has not yet dropped its Centrino platform prices because it does not see a credible challenge from AMD. The day it gets a whiff that AMD has a better or even somewhat equal solution, it will start getting paranoid and will try to maintain marketshare at any cost, and reducing price is one of the most effective ways to do so.
AMD badly needed to compete with Intel in the mobile computing market, and the Puma platform should get them some design wins, which would hopefully fuel a price war between the Puma and Santa Rosa platforms. At the risk of sounding cliched, the ultimate winner would be the customer. Unfortunately, despite AMD's efforts, I still think that AMD would be a marginal player in the mobile segment for some time to come, and would mainly competing with Intel C2Ds on price. I have yet to see AMD make compelling chips and platform designs for low power and ultra low-power laptops, for example. I would love to see it happen though, as this is one area where Intel is plainly getting away with overpricing their chips and platform solutions.
What surprises me is why AMD is not putting in more efforts in making better mobile chips and platforms, when this is the one segment that is truly growing at a compounded rate. Heck, Centrino (and P-M) was the one and only reason that Intel managed to make a profit in the inglorious P4 days. One clear use case that I see is in corporations transitioning from desktops to laptops is simply "work-life balance". With the crazy hours that people are working nowadays, and the fact that broadband has become affordable, this will be the one carrot that more and more companies will dangle to keep their employees reasonably happy. Furthermore, as computers become commodities, people will increasingly look at differentiators such as mobility, ease of use, and connectivity instead of flexibility which was the desktop's forte. The only way in which this can truly happen though is if laptop prices start matching desktops in price and to some extent, in performance. In fact, performance is increasingly becoming irrelevant as most dual-cores and quad-cores are overkill for most users, even your so-called "power" users. Except for some niche areas like CAD or image processing, I have yet to see users complain because they are bottlenecked by their processor. Most users do get bottlenecked by their RAM or battery life (in case of laptops) though.
Slashdot Mirror
Apologize for being blunt.
I know this is wildly offtopic, but Saturn is just simply soo cool! If you want to get ANYBODY hooked onto astronomy, just show them a picture of Saturn. I shudder to think of the day we will strip-mine Saturn (or equivalent heinousness), and will defile the planet with our greed. At least, we can hope.
The linkage in the article is incorrect. The linked article talks about a startup (Elementeo) founded by a 13 year old kid named Anshul Samar, and NOT about PlaySpan, supposedly founded by 12 year old named Arjun Mehta.
Sloppy.
Interestingly enough, Intel has traditionally adopted the exact opposite chip design strategy. IMHO, Intel's design ethos is first driven by manufacturing, and only secondly by pure design. Of course, they have every right to do so as they've consistently led the industry in process and manufacturing technology. However, this sometimes teeters into arrogance, and they have tended to fix a shoddy design by throwing cache at it, and/or relying on a die shrink (which also fabulously shrinks cache!).
This process/cache luxury, compounded by bureaucracy can tend to make Intel come up with conservative designs. I'm not even going to talk about P4 or Prescott as it has been beaten to death and beyond. However, Justin Rattner recently hinted the same thing as well when he encouraged his research teams to come up with bolder and even impractical designs, and not start thinking about commercial viability so early on in the research/design stage. AMD, OTOH, simply cannot afford this luxure as they're usually getting whipped by Intel manufacturing AND by Intel marketing muscle, and are usually in a "do or die" mode. This usually makes them come up with riskier or bolder design.
Having said that, Core2 is a superb architecture, and in my opinion, will be neck-to-neck with even Barcelona (win some benchmarks, lose some benchmarks). Its only in the server space that AMD will have two distinct advantages: Hypertransport for scalability, and DDR2 instead of FBD for power consumption. Sigh... if only Intel had not scrapped Whitefield. I guess it would have released by now.. and that too with a native quadcore design and CSI. Look at the Tigerton hack-job for a contrast... pathetic (but of course, easier to manufacture).
Back to your point, my ears can't really make out the difference between a CD and an MP3 as long as the MP3 is encoded at a decent bitrate. I can clearly make out the difference between a 128kbps and 256kbps, but not between 256kbps and 320kbps or VBR.
I agree, and my personal experience with corporate passwords has been the same. I'm sure this would disturb security geeks at various levels (or get them salivating!), but I don't see this as a *huge* loophole since most of the systems are inside the corporate firewall anyway. IMHO, this is about as big a security threat as an employee or a contractor copying sensitive data (which the password is protecting) and trying to profit from it illegally.
A system that I was managing once started crashing, and further investigation revealed that the password of an upstream system had been changed. When we contacted the admin team of the offending application, they informed us that they had upgraded the password from 123 to the "highly secure" (in their words) 234.
REBOOT! (and rejoice, and talk to me about uptime later)
How poetic!
Yes, and I'm happy to see that at least we're making *some* progress. I'm also saddened to see that apart from HIV, there is hardly any research going on to find cures for infectious diseases (TB, Malaria, viral diseases), at least when compared to the obscene amount of money being thrown into chronic or "lifestyle" diseases like diabetes and hypertension. This is all the more disturbing considering that infectious diseases afflict and kill so many more people than chronic diseases. It just so happens that most of the people afflicted happen to be from developing or poor countries, and hence, are not the target market segment for big pharma.
An interesting idea that I read somewhere proposed the setting up of Ansari-X style rewards or competitions for the company or team that first finds a cure/vaccine for these unfashionable diseases. This also becomes an easy way out for charity foundations like the Gates foundation, who're actually trying to do something meaningful in this field. Instead of giving grants to researchers much like a venture capitalist, perhaps instituting sizable multi-million dollar rewards is a better incentive for researchers. Plus, there is no need to monitor the charity money to make sure that it is being utilized properly. But then again, this might simply be an oversimplified solution to the problem.
"What if I don't want my graphics cards fighting it out to see who survives?"
You're right. It's cruel, especially if one of them decides to fight on the sli.
Ha, you might be a parallel programmer, but can you compete with him?? :-D
No, most people don't overclock, even though it has become MUCH simpler nowadays to do simple overclocks (as it no longer requires hardware tweaks). Furthermore, overclocking does decrease the reliability and longevity of the CPU, as has been mentioned before in this thread. I still think there is some merit for hardware sites to focus on overclocking mainly because it gives you an indication of the headroom available in the CPU architecture (merom/conroe/woodcrest in this case), which indirectly gives you an indication of how good or robust the architecture is, and if it can still hold its own against the competition. This also gives you an indication if your investment in the said architecture will be worthwhile or not.
To answer your other questions, the "..50" set of Conroe CPUs have the same TDP (65W for the non-Extreme models) as their older versions, and you can expect a small improvement in system stability, mainly because of the new stepping and because Intel should have likely made several improvements in its 65nm manufacturing process over the last year. The new chipset also has a much better memory interface, though you will not notice the improvements in real life usage unless you are planning on a quad core. On the flip side, i believe that the new chipset consumes a bit more power than the earlier 965 chipset, but it's not an obscene increase.
If you already have a dual-core, you might want to wait a little until quad-cores get cheaper (Intel should be reducing quad-core prices by July-end, and you should be able to get it for $300). However, if you currently have a single core processor, and if you don't do any "extreme" computation, an upgrade to a dual core would definitely be a good idea. Even though individual softwares are not yet optimized to use multiple threads, you will notice that your computer is more "responsive", especially if you have several background softwares/processes running that periodically max out CPU usage on one of your cores.
Yes, I realize that my question was off-topic. My question was a more generic one, namely Linux v/s OpenBSD in terms of security.
I was also interested in knowing how popular BSD and Linux are for these kind of requirements.
Sorry for the naive question in advance, but I was under the impression that some flavors of BSD (OpenBSD?) were extremely secure as well. Is that not so? In that case, wouldn't a BSD version be more suitable for secure/sensitive installations?
Again, please don't treat this as a flame. I'm just curious to know how BSD ranks vis a vis other OSes, especially Linux, and especially in terms of security.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but from the slightly different perspective. Things like the patent system (or DRM or privacy issues) have become so illogical that there's no way an average person can fight against the system by sane and normal means such as lawsuits, petitions, or elections. The most effective way to get rid of these stupid laws, IMHO, is by making sure that they self-destruct, i.e. become utterly ridiculous in the eyes of the media and the public. So, rejoice when people start filing patents for their navel lint or nasal hair structure. Chuckle gleefully when DRM softwares start taking people's system and create massive security holes. Cackle manically if some wiseguy sues McD for kaching-illion dollars because their "Happy Meal" didn't exactly make him happy. For remember, the candle burneth brightest before it dies out, to rehash a hoary saw. Or at least, we hope.
Hmmm... that does ring a Bell.
Consequently, all packets transmitted through WiFi will now need to have the text, "WiFi Kills".
I see your point, but the customer DOES benefit sometimes. Take the current ongoing price war between AMD and Intel on desktop CPUs. Man, you wouldn't have dreamt of getting a good quadcore for under $300 a few months ago. My argument is that Intel has not yet dropped its Centrino platform prices because it does not see a credible challenge from AMD. The day it gets a whiff that AMD has a better or even somewhat equal solution, it will start getting paranoid and will try to maintain marketshare at any cost, and reducing price is one of the most effective ways to do so.
AMD badly needed to compete with Intel in the mobile computing market, and the Puma platform should get them some design wins, which would hopefully fuel a price war between the Puma and Santa Rosa platforms. At the risk of sounding cliched, the ultimate winner would be the customer. Unfortunately, despite AMD's efforts, I still think that AMD would be a marginal player in the mobile segment for some time to come, and would mainly competing with Intel C2Ds on price. I have yet to see AMD make compelling chips and platform designs for low power and ultra low-power laptops, for example. I would love to see it happen though, as this is one area where Intel is plainly getting away with overpricing their chips and platform solutions.
What surprises me is why AMD is not putting in more efforts in making better mobile chips and platforms, when this is the one segment that is truly growing at a compounded rate. Heck, Centrino (and P-M) was the one and only reason that Intel managed to make a profit in the inglorious P4 days. One clear use case that I see is in corporations transitioning from desktops to laptops is simply "work-life balance". With the crazy hours that people are working nowadays, and the fact that broadband has become affordable, this will be the one carrot that more and more companies will dangle to keep their employees reasonably happy. Furthermore, as computers become commodities, people will increasingly look at differentiators such as mobility, ease of use, and connectivity instead of flexibility which was the desktop's forte. The only way in which this can truly happen though is if laptop prices start matching desktops in price and to some extent, in performance. In fact, performance is increasingly becoming irrelevant as most dual-cores and quad-cores are overkill for most users, even your so-called "power" users. Except for some niche areas like CAD or image processing, I have yet to see users complain because they are bottlenecked by their processor. Most users do get bottlenecked by their RAM or battery life (in case of laptops) though.